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Email continues to be a vital channel for effective customer service. The raise of smartphones allows customers to email easily anytime and from anywhere. Companies that rely on traditional email programs fail to provide accurate and timely responses, especially for large volume of emails. These desktop email programs may be fine for small scale customer service operations.However, the customer service representatives may not be able to handle large volumes of incoming messages.

Good customer service is all about handling the email requests in accordance with the customer expectations. The email sent by customer support representatives in a day is just one of dozens. But, it might be the only mail received from your company that day. Hence, consider it to be an opportunity to interact with the customer and make it as best as possible.

It doesn’t matter what you do, but the modern jobs seem to need everyone bombard with emails throughout the day. If you are feeling overwhelmed by emails and feel like you will never get a clean inbox, go through the below tips that help you manage your inbox effectively.

Respond to mails in a timely manner

Responding to the mails as quickly as possible keeps you look professional. It is completely a balancing act and you should follow the 2-2-2- rule, which imposes a strict time to respond or give reply. You can opt for email help desk solution, if you don’t have time to respond within 2 hours. Whether it is marketing or sales, you can handle all the inbound requests from one common help desk interface. All your emails will be converted automatically to actionable tickets. You can prioritize these tickets for appropriate team for their actions or support agents to respond. Be sure to keep the reply simple and short.

Use filters and labels

Filtering the emails according to their category will help you organize your mails effectively and reply ina timely manner. Filter the mailing list emails, organizations memo’s, CC’ed emails etc to get rid of cluttered inbox. You can use the set filter and label feature of today’s email programs to organize incoming emails. Mark messages as important to keep the inbox clean and prevent you from getting overwhelmed. Move important and unimportant emails to their respective folders. Find out common spam words that get into your inbox.

Build a knowledge base

The customer service representatives have to answer same the question again and again to different customers. A self-serve knowledge base with answers to common questions will help you cut down the support tickets. Be sure to have an informative and useful knowledge base that customers actually want to use. One of the best tips to create a knowledge base is the replies you have created. This will eventually decrease the volume of emails and stop you getting overwhelmed by your inbox.

Don’t answer each and every email

The main job of customer support agents is to reply customer queries. However, it is not must to reply each and every mail they get in their inbox. Don’t answer the CC’ed emails, as they may consume lot of time. You can read them after replying urgent and important emails. However, go through the CC’ed emails to stay informed with the query. Move it to the read folder, if you cannot read it immediately. Don’t mind filtering it again and schedule a reading time on that folder to read all the mails at once.

Mail linking and mass reply

There are many email management solutions that allow you to reply multiple mails at one go. Using these tools, you can even merge tickets, split tickets and stay on the top of email communication. You can even check the current status of the ticket and history of email activity, to know what exactly have been asked and what actions are pending.

Use search function

Wading through email folders is the best way to search a mail. You need not to become an ‘email collector’ to stack all the mails in your inbox. You need to learn how to use the search function effectively. This will help you find what exactly you are looking for without the need of going through multiple folders. To make the search function much beneficial, use it in conjunction with good filters.

Delete mails

Always take an action, whether to keep or delete after reading a mail. If it is not of much importance, don’t save it or move it into a folder. If you are not able to take action or give reply to a particular mail, delegate it to someone else. Every email does not need a response, and saving it will waste your time. If it is difficult to delete multiple mails, create a folder and move all the mails to that folder. Remember that email is not a calendar or to-do-list.

By following the above tips, you can stop getting overwhelmed by inbox. These are not only tips that help you clean the inbox, but the ones that have been useful for years. Vision Helpdesk offers a complete online support solution – knowledge base, ticketing help desk, multi-channel support, and email help desk and feedback system.